Using Gamified eLearning to Support Knowledge Retention after a Highly Technical Course

Driving 80% post-course engagement with a program that used to be on “pen and paper” only

Engineers at this leading HVAC company need to know a lot: it isn’t simple to sell, service and maintain air conditioning systems at some of the world’s largest and most famous commercial,

industrial and institutional buildings.

The company invests heavily in its engineers’ knowledge. “We have engineers coming to our headquarters, literally from all over the world, to train for 5 months”, says the company’s Training Project Leader. “This is five months of very technical very hands-on training.”

“Actually the program is harder than college!” she exclaims. “There are a lot of Math and technical requirements and they attend lectures in a theater from 9 to 5”, so one of the key concerns post program completion is to ensure learning repetition happens after the course is over. Another goal is to create a learning community. “We want people to be able to solve these problems and also go back to their colleagues from the course and get their advice”.

In the past, the company used to email its employees additional materials to review and to practice. The practice hardly enabled tracking of learning after the course and gave the company little control over the results.

The company’s learning team knew it needed to drive learning both for employee knowledge retention and also because, even after five months, employees still needed to undergo additional on-the-job training.

This is where GamEffective comes in. It has been in use by the company for the past four years, resulting in a high engagement of 80% on average throughout the five-month period after the course.

Our employees typically graduate from the training course in June” says the training manager. “Now the gamification part begins, running from July to December. We begin by reviewing and revisiting key technical concepts taught over the course, to combat the forgetting curve” she says. “We also administer other content, such as professional account management practices and the like”. The company takes care to pace learning, so people keep coming back. “In the first month post-training we release all the content at once, so the learners can log in as much as they want. During subsequent months we release 4-8 e-learning nuggets every week, to pace learning, keep learners engaged and combat the forgetting curve with spaced repetition. This was done as part of an analysis of how to apply best practices”.

Another core requirement of the program, is keeping the social interconnectedness developed during the long course. “It’s important that we keep it social and encourage knowledge sharing. We ask people to take pictures of sales calls, comment on their recent learning and more”.

Engineers are also using the community to check their knowledge and as a support network. Today, 80% of engineers complete 5-10 hours of training per week post graduation, using GamEffective’s platform.